Misunderstanding media: we all swim the torrent. - book review

Reason, August, 2002 by Jesse Walker

The answer, I suppose, is that the publisher feels there is more of a market for that sort of book than for the one Gitlin has actually written. The country is filled with people who fret that political declarations have been gradually compressed into seven-second soundbites without stopping to consider whether the longer versions had much content either; people who wail about the ways the media distract us without asking, with Gitlin, "Distraction from what?"; and people who view the media as an evil monolith, rather than a mixture of good elements, bad elements, and themselves.

Our illusions about the media are almost as interesting as the media themselves. Not that that's surprising--after all, they're part of the media too.

Associate Editor Jesse Walker (jwalker@reason.com) is the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press).